Beware of the Lame Duck Session

Beware of the Lame Duck Session

by Phyllis Schlafly

November 7, 2012

The current Congress hasn’t finished its mischief. It still has the opportunity to do bad things in the upcoming Lame Duck session, a period when members of Congress who are already defeated will have the opportunity to vote without concern for voter approval.

The globalists have been plotting to use the volatility of this Lame Duck session to achieve some of their internationalist goals that they couldn’t get passed during the last four years. In particular, they would like to lock us into treaties that slice out various parts of our national sovereignty, a concept that they have been trying to promote as obsolete.

The globalists could make a surprise treaty push for ratification of the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (UNATT). This treaty is coming under the radar since gun-control advocates know it could never pass the U.S. Senate after debate in broad daylight.

The gun-control advocates assume that private ownership of guns is inherently dangerous. They hope they can achieve their goal of prohibiting private ownership by the covert strategy of a treaty with vague language, and so far have been successful in avoiding media attention.

Supposedly UNATT is merely designed to regulate government-to-government arms transfers and direct sales by manufacturers to governments. Its danger to our Second Amendment is its innocuous treaty language that can impact on the use and ownership of guns by individuals.

Another plan to ratify an anti-sovereignty treaty and subject us to unwelcome global regulations is the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This mischievous document was signed for the U.S. by UN Ambassador Susan Rice (now famous for giving big TV time to Obama’s lies about the Benghazi disaster).

We don’t need a treaty that sets up UN busybodies to assure benefits and protections for persons with disabilities. We already treat individuals, able or disabled, rich or poor, better than any other nation by our Americans with Disabilities Act, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Fair Housing Act, Rehabilitation Act, Voting Accessibility for Elderly and Handicapped Act, Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, and Architectural Barriers Act.

The feminists are using this treaty as an opportunity to promote their abortion agenda. Article 25 requires signatory states to “provide persons with disabilities … free or affordable health care … including in the area of sexual and reproductive health and population-based health programmes.”

The globalists desperately want us to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which was a bad idea when Ronald Reagan rejected it in 1981, and which has soured rather than ripened in its years of languishing in the Senate. This treaty cedes sovereign control over practically all the riches at the bottom of the world’s oceans to an International Seabed Authority.

The treaty’s one-nation-one-vote setup assures control by Third World countries, while Uncle Sap is expected to finance the technology and investment to bring the sea’s minerals to the surface. This treaty sets up a system of dispute resolution by the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) based in Hamburg, Germany, whose judgments about “maritime disputes” can be enforced against Americans.

U.S. access to the high seas, as well as freedom of the seas for all countries, is best protected by a superior U.S. Navy, not by regulations made by UN paper-pushers financed by a global tax. Instead of paying tribute to a UN tribunal, we should build more U.S. ships so America can fulfill its mission to keep the seas open for commerce and national defense.

Still lurking in the drawers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is the U.N. Treaty on the Rights of the Child, a broadside attack on parents’ rights to raise their own children. This impudent Treaty purports to give children their own right (against their parents) to express their views freely in all matters, to receive information of all kinds through “media of the child’s choice,” to attend a church of the child’s choice (not his parents’), to be protected from interference with his correspondence, to have access to information from national and international sources in the media, to use his own language, and to have the right to “rest and leisure.”

After ratification, treaties become part of the “supreme law” of the United States on a par with federal statutes, which gives supremacist judges the power to invent their own interpretations. The whole concept of putting the United States in the noose of global organizations, in which the U.S. has only the same one vote as Cuba, is offensive to Americans, and all these UN treaties should be scrapped forthwith.